Legal News

Three cases concerning contributory action and re-engagement, injury to feelings and blacklisted airline pilots come under scrutiny in this week’s NLJ. Ian Smith, barrister, emeritus professor of employment law at the Norwich Law School, UEA, and author of NLJ’s monthly employment law brief, comments that cases on re-engagement, the first in the trio, are ‘relatively rare’. This case ‘shows how carefully an employment tribunal must construe exactly what is expected of it when considering re-engagement’.

From moths in the attic to the right to manage, 2024 provided a plethora of landmark real estate litigation cases. In this week’s NLJ, Ben Hatton, director of property litigation, Jordan Gulwell, lawyer, and Natasha Vij, trainee solicitor, at Clifford Chance, survey the stand-out cases and set out some lessons to learn from each.

Former district judge Stephen Gold highlights some unplanned side-effects of proposed legislation to include the names of claimants in the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines, in this week’s NLJ.

What happened in family law in the last quarter of 2024? A lot, as demonstrated by Ellie Hampson-Jones, senior associate, and Carla Ditz, knowledge development lawyer at Stewarts, authors of NLJ’s family law brief.

Digital identity services and other reforms will be introduced to streamline searches and speed up conveyancing times, the government has said.

Judges have, for the first time, been issued with sentencing guidelines on blackmail, kidnap and false imprisonment.

An expert panel rather than a High Court judge would provide safeguards under the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is now at the committee stage.

Law firms and legal departments may need to do more to bring their workforce up to speed on artificial intelligence (AI), according to the Future Lawyers Report 2025, published last week.

The justice budget for the coming year, 2025–26, is set to be about one third higher (£13.5bn) in real terms than in 2019–20 (£10bn), according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Lawyers and judges have to embrace artificial intelligence (AI)—‘albeit cautiously and responsibly’—Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, has said.